It’s been available for order a little while now, but Clockwork Phoenix 2 is officially out now, and editor Mike Allen is offering a PDF copy to anybody who promises to blog about it in return. See that link for more details.
I’ve posted four more stories of mine up at AnthologyBuilder. The new additions include “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood,” which (just between you and me) is one of my personal favorites.
How the hell did I manage to get Rosamund and Gertrude into a fight?
With each other?
This is even weirder than the algebra.
Okay, the algebra has moved on to calculus and from thence to astrophysics (kniedzw‘s idea), picking up a side order of Norse mythology along the way, and now I’m trying to decide on a suitable driving weight for what started out as the world’s most improbable clock and has gotten weirder since.
. . . I love my job.
Even if sometimes it randomly requires math.
How the hell did I put myself in a position where my historical faerie novel is requiring me to do ALGEBRA?
Wrote a cumulative 3806 today in various new scenes, rummaging around in the guts of Part Two to make everything fall into the new order. Still need to replace the scene that introduces the CR itself, and then do at least a rough polish on the Magrat conversation, the coffee-house, and Carline; then probably wholesale replace 80% of the Vauxhall scene, and I’ll finally be ready to finish the scene I was in the middle of writing when I realized I needed to redo half of what I’d done.
One of the cherished delusions of the aspiring writer is that this stuff gets easier as you go. Sure, maybe you have to rework your first novel three times, but after a while you learn to produce clean drafts, right?
Yeah, I’m going the other way. I’ve never had to hack a book apart half as much as I’ve done with this one already. Please, please, don’t let this trend continue.
Word count: 36,810 and trying not to think about how I’m running to stay in place
LBR census: I had to work really hard to find a reason why it wasn’t blood.
Authorial sadism: Yes, Galen, when you get a good idea I will make you share it with the class.
I know there’s a way to code an e-mail link so it doesn’t get used by ‘bots to spam me. Can anybody tell me how that’s done?
I’ve been digging for ages now, attempting to discover when people in Britain first sighted Halley’s comet in 1759. Not when it was first seen in general; I know Palitzsch spotted it on Christmas Day, 1758, and Messier picked it up a month later, and then lots of people saw it after perihelion, throughout March and April. So I figured that if I aimed to have this book in seven sections, one per season, then I should start in summer 1757, because odds were it got spotted in Britain some time in winter 1759.
Those lazy bastards of eighteenth-century British astronomy apparently didn’t pick up the damn thing until April 30th. Which means that, for the purpose of my structure, I need to start the book in autumn 1757.
It isn’t a simple matter of changing date stamps on the scenes, either. Galen’s conversation with his father is partly predicated on the assumption that it’s summer, and therefore a lousy time to be attempting any kind of large-scale social networking. Ergo, his attempts on that front don’t begin until part two. Also, there’s a scene that has to take place on October 3rd, but part one is too early to use it, so I’ll have to rework that idea for part five instead. Etc. Etc.
The worst part is, I think this change will be a good thing. Example: I couldn’t introduce the Royal Society properly until part two, because they were on hiatus from June until November 10th. Problem solved! Now I can have them in play sooner. Another example: there was a comet sighted in late September/early October, that I was having trouble working into the scene flow of part two. It will, however, do very nicely for an early note in part one. I suspect a whole lot of things will balance out more usefully once I boot the story back one season. But this is going to mean a crap-ton of very frustrating revision on the 33.5K I already have written, because I didn’t find the answer I needed until just now. And that’s almost certainly going to put me behind, because I think I need to get my extant wordage sorted out before I’ll be okay to proceed forward.
Snarl.
And sigh. I do think things will be better this way. But I’m rather ticked at myself for not turning this info up sooner, and at Bradley and all his cohort for failing to spot the bloody comet until almost May. We’re going to have to make some changes around here . . . .
Okay, I’ve been in games where we blow up elevator shafts with a jet-skis, and I’ve been in games where we steal reincarnated lama/camels from Tibetan peasants, and I’ve been in games where meddling dwarves send their friends off with picnic baskets full of spells designed to make them stop blushing at each other and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT ALREADY . . .
. . . but I’ve never been in a game where a character glued an NPC to his back.
Nor, now that I think of it, have we ever driven the GM to drink. Must try harder!
I can tell I haven’t really gotten into the flow of a scene when all my paragraphs are of the same length. Long paragraphs and short ones are part of the dynamics and tempo of narrative; with no variation, everything’s at the same volume, the same pace. When they start contrasting more, it’s a sign I’m doing something right.
From this insight, I conclude I’m going to have to rewrite the first five hundred words of this scene.
But that’s a job for later.
CBS has all of the original series available online, so I’ve been running episodes while I clean my office or do laundry or whatever. Not entirely sure why; I have to admit that my opinion of the show hasn’t changed much. There are the occasional moments I enjoy, but there’s also hella clunky writing, cheap sets, overacting, and a general lack of the things I love (like arc plots and long-term character development).
It’s interesting to look at it with historical perspective, though. The technology: I presume they did their best to be futuristic, but now it’s this weird mash of incredibly dated limitations (tapes???) and still-implausible handwavium (tricorders). The plots, reflecting the concerns and ideals of the time. But what really gets me, as you might expect, are the characters.
I think I have an easier time coping with the show’s racial shortcomings because it’s easier for me to recognize the ways in which it was progressive for the time. I mean, two non-white bridge officers? Sure, Uhura does almost nothing of note (at least as far as I’ve watched), but as Whoopie Goldberg said to her mother, there’s a black woman on television, and she ain’t no maid. And there’s the occasional black or Asian background character, too. I still cringe at things like, oh, the casting of a Mexican actor as a northern Indian Sikh, but I can usually manage to get past it, by focusing on the ways in which this was an improvement over the mass of media at the time.
With gender, it’s harder. Maybe I just don’t know enough about female roles elsewhere on TV at the time? Because it sticks in my craw that the women are mostly just sex objects, and on the rare occasion that one of them has a relevant professional role (the psychologist in “Dagger of the Mind,” the historian in “Space Seed”) their narrative function is to be incompetent and screw everything up. The men constantly reduce them to their attractiveness and/or treat them like children, and the women respond accordingly. I damn near cheered when I watched “Amok Time” (I’m at the beginning of S2 now), because while Vulcan marital tradition blatantly reduces women to prizes for the men, T’Pring quite cleverly manipulates that tradition to achieve her own ends. Go go gadget agency! And you get T’Pau, who’s respected, powerful, and able to help the protagonists — because she chooses to, not because she has to. Vulcans: 2, Humans: 0, where non-objectified women are concerned.
(Incidentally, having watched “Amok Time” — I don’t know when exactly K/S came into existence, i.e. whether it existed before that ep . . . but ye gods is that thing slashy. Much is now explained.)
The fact that I’ve watched so much is really more a testament to my obsessive sense of completism (and the ease of online watching) than any growing affection; there’s maybe two or three eps so far I’d have any desire to watch a second time. I really wish some of the other series were available online, so I could give them a shot, but sadly this does not seem to be the case.
I think I’ve said before that one of the things I love about RPGs is the over-the-top b.s. we get up to, that I would never put into a story. Like tonight, when a French artificer, a Haitian capoeirista/houngan, and a Japanese-American onmyoji (this totally sounds like the setup to a joke) stole three camels, one of whom is a reincarnated lama in hiding (the pun was intentional, and IC to boot) from a Tibetan peasant, and left in payment a gem nicked out of the fifteenth-century Kazakh tomb of Tamurlane’s chief wizard.
I would never mash those elements into a story together. But it’s fun.
Next week, we break into the hidden basement of the reconstructed Ganden Monastery to steal an angelic artifact from under the noses of the communist Chinese police. Wish us luck!
Word count: 30,038
LBR census: I think fear counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Since my last update . . . making Irrith play politics, and making Galen face down twenty-five tons of By The Way You Know You’re Mortal, Right?
Halfway through Part Two (of seven). I don’t feel like my narrative momentum has quite cohered yet, but we’re getting there. Mostly it’s still Irrith giving me trouble. Unlike Galen, she didn’t show up with her intestines on a platter, asking if I’d like to play with them; I’m having to pry useful conflict out of her.
This is what happens when you write a relatively care-free character. It’s hard, getting her to care about stuff.
But Galen’s at the Royal Society now. I wonder just how many photographed pages of minutes I’m going to read through before I decide I really don’t give a damn when Henry Cavendish first attended a meeting, and that nobody will much care if I put him there in late 1757. After all, biographical info on the guy is remarkably sketchy, so aside from the minutes, there’s probably no record at all of when he showed up for the first time. And given that I had to photograph handwritten pages out of giant leatherbound volumes you can only get by applying to use the Royal Society library and then filling out request forms, the odds of anybody being able to call me on my error are pretty low.
(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and there’s nobody qualified to notice, does it constitute an error?)
Er, nevermind. Since they helpfully put visitors at the beginning of each set of minutes, and those are easy to find, I, um, already found my answer. June 15th, 1758. Possibly not his first meeting, but the first one in the range I copied, and therefore the first that will appear in this narrative.
(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and a deranged writer runs over to prop it back up again, does it constitute grounds for involuntary commitment?)
Bedtime now. Before I go even crazier.
Things are getting worse over there. More violent, as the basiji and the riot police and the Revolutionary Guard crack down, dispersing crowds, attacking protestors, hauling people away to jail. Which isn’t good — but in the end, this may be what takes Khamenei down. I honestly don’t expect him to survive (politically speaking) past the end of this. Rafsanjani is almost certainly in Qom, and it sounds like he’s gathering enough support to either replace Khamenei with a new Supreme Leader, or ditch that structure entirely for something else (though still a theocratic something else). It’s possible Khamenei will muster enough armed force to survive the complete loss of legitimacy for his regime; he could potentially pull off naked military dictatorship. For a while. But I’ll be surprised if he does.
If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for Iranian updates, you could do worse than to go with Andrew Sullivan; he might drown you under the sheer flood of updates, but he’s staying on top of things.
I bring him up because he made a point the other day that’s really stuck in my head, regarding the way these events have changed American perception of the Iranian people. Not long ago, they were one pillar of the Axis of Evil: unknown, unknowable, the frightening horde who might destroy our way of life because they are Not Like Us. I think that’s changed, at least for anyone who’s been following this news. They may be anonymous, but they aren’t Other. How can they be, when they use Twitter and Facebook and Youtube, like any American might do? It isn’t just the familiar service names, either; it’s the way they connect us directly to Iranian voices. You can read their thoughts in 140 characters or less — broken, misspelled, sometimes mangled by Google Translate’s newly-instituted Persian capability, but it’s like they’re speaking in your ear. You can cheer the protestors on as they make riot police break and run; you can look through the eyes of the man filming a group of basiji arresting and carting away one of his neighbors, the camera perched on the windowsill, the man himself probably crouching out of sight so the basiji don’t spot him and arrest him, too, and hear his whispered curses. You can listen to a young woman speaking in darkness, while around her Tehran chants “Allahu Akbar” into the night sky.
You see people. You hear people. Foreign, but not alien. Men, and a lot of women; some old, but many young. Maybe they don’t speak English, or don’t speak it well, and maybe their ideas of what kind of freedom they want aren’t the same as yours, but that’s the Iranian people, right there on your computer, half a world away.
Bad journalism turns events into empty words, events without faces or meaning. Good journalism weaves it into a narrative, trying to create the reality in your mind, but even then it’s mediated and polished and tidied up. This is raw, fragmentary, chaotic, and immediate. This is a peephole through which you can glimpse a very large whole.
And when it’s over — whatever the outcome — there will be a lot of Americans who see people where the Axis of Evil used to be.
Yes, I really do mean to use that icon.
When you have a (popped) blister on your left foot that extends partway under the edge of a callus and you don’t want the skin to tear because it’s going to be unpleasant when it does and besides you’ll be grinding dirt into it all karate class long which is a good way to get an infection but band-aids come flying off the moment you pivot unless you put tape over them and that leads to you STICKING TO THE FLOOR when you try to pivot . . .
. . . then sometimes, just sometimes, you get clever.
You dig out your old lyrical shoes — which only barely qualify as “shoes” — and that protects the necessary area while still leaving you 95% barefoot.
And you don’t stick to the floor.
Most of you have probably seen this, as it’s been posted from here to Siberia, but:
I first saw it on sartorias‘ journal, and there’s been an interesting little debate over there. We can all agree, I think, that putting the little assertion on the video that it constitutes fair use means precisely jack; it wouldn’t do any good in court. Having said that — is this fair use?
Well, we can’t decide that, any more than the vidder can; the only thing that can really establish an answer (so far as I’m aware) is a court case. But I think it is. I saw commentators over on sartorias‘ LJ breaking the two halves apart, talking about how the vid definitely parodies Twilight but plays its Buffy scenes fairly straight. IANA IP expert, but I don’t think that’s the way to view it. The question is the purpose of the work as a whole, not its constituent parts. And I’d say, in my opinion, that the vid in its entirety does indeed pass that test.
Collage can qualify as transformative work, so far as I’m aware; you can cut up and re-use copyrighted material in order to make a larger work. Montages are the same thing, in video. So if you put together a montage which serves a distinct purpose, one not identical to that of the original material, then yes, I think it should count as fair use. It’s possible, I suppose, that a judge could say this is fair use of Twilight (since Stephanie Meyer’s purpose was not to show Edward as a creepy, socially inept stalker who deserves staking), but not of Buffy (since Joss Whedon’s purpose was, among other things, to critique certain tropes of vampire narrative). But I see this as the layperson equivalent of using, oh, Judith Butler’s theories to comment on gender issues in Twilight. You apply one thing to another thing in order to make some points about it. Why should it be different just because the thing being applied is material from a media franchise, rather than the words of an academic 99% of the country has never heard of?
Of course, it is different. One of these entities has the money and possibly the will to pursue a court case over potential infringement; the other does not. But however practical that difference may be, the concept of it annoys me.
I think things like this should be fair use. I think society benefits from the ability to play things off one another in this fashion, to engage with them directly, rather than leaving them in hermetically-sealed containers such that we can only look at them through the glass. Will this vid financially damage Buffy and those who profit from it? Probably not. Will it damage Stephenie Meyer et al? Maybe. After all, Twilight is the target of the criticism here. But a negative review can do the same thing, and can include quotes from the text to boot. I see just as much original effort in the (exceedingly well-done) editing of these video clips as I do in the composition of that review.
(Tagging this “fanfiction” because it’s a crossover narrative in vid form, but mostly because this is part and parcel of my thoughts on fanfiction, so it’s better to keep them all under the same tag.)
The small neatness is that “A Mask of Flesh has apparently earned an Honorable Mention in the twenty-sixth Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. (I had no idea he also recced fantasy; that story is definitely not science-y in its speculation.)
The much bigger neatness is that I’m one of NINE Clockwork Phoenix authors so honored — which, for an anthology with eighteen stories in it, is a damned impressive success rate. Congrats not only to my fellow authors, but most especially to Mike, for putting together such a great volume!
(Now might be a good time to mention that you can buy the second volume in the series . . . or the first, if you haven’t already. I’ve got stories in both.)
Sadly, it appears that Talebones is closing. When I sold them “The Snow-White Heart,” I hoped that meant the magazine would continue on, but Patrick Swenson has decided to call an end, after thirty-nine issues. I hope the plan to perpetuate it as anthologies works out, though; I’ve enjoyed my dealings with Patrick, and the anthology market appears to be reviving after years in a moribund state, so that may actually be a viable course of action.
Let me segue from that bad news to some good news that arrived while I was on the road, hence not posting it until now. You may recognize the name of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the biweekly online magazine that has brought you (among other things) my stories “Kingspeaker” and “Driftwood.” I’ve discussed them magazine before; they’re publishing good, strong narrative fantasy that happens to cover a broader range than usual of settings. In the nine months they’ve been running, I’ve seen Middle Eastern settings, African ones, Asian, Mesoamerican, frontier Western . . . Scott Andrews, the editor, has a real commitment to exactly the kind of experimentation I like.
I bring them up because Scott has recently completed arrangements for BCS to qualify as a non-profit, and that means he’s started seeking donations. (I don’t know for sure, but I think he was funding it out-of-pocket before.) He’s paying pro rates for a nice diversity of stories, both in print and podcast forms, and As You Know, Bob, the number of magazines doing that nowadays is shrinking steadily. I don’t know about you, but I want to see this one survive. It’s the only magazine I’ve ever encountered where I read every story (though not all of them work out for me), where I will in fact make the effort to go back and read issues I’ve missed, if I was busy or traveling when the new one(s) went live.
I can’t give it a stronger recommendation than that — without pretending it provides you with a free flying unicorn that shoots lasers and is a ninja whenever you read a story.
How much you donate, and on what schedule is up to you. You can give a lump sum now, or chip in fifty cents every time you read (or listen to) a story you like. Whatever. But check it out, and if you like what they’re doing, give a thought to supporting them. This isn’t charity; it’s a business model, and I hope it succeeds.
I don’t have anything terribly deep to say on the subject; what I knew about Iranian politics a week ago would have made about one medium-sized paragraph, and that was it. But I’ve been following the news since the election, and want to download some of these thoughts out of my head.
Last night I stayed up late writing, and today I slept until late in the morning, and a week after returning home, I am finally back to my normal self. All is right with the world.
So it seems a good time for more linky. First up, another Mind Meld:
Many world-building science fiction and fantasy writers get their inspiration from real-life places. What real-life city seems the most fantastical or science fictional to you?
I of course start out by saying London, but use that as a jumping-off point for talking about what makes a place fantastical or science fictional to me.
Next, an interview I meant to link days ago, but was slapped down by brief illness: Lobster and Canary (not remotely to be confused with Cat and Muse), where I am interviewed by a fellow Harvard folk&mythie — though not one from my own time there. (Also, if you missed it during LJ’s problems last Friday, I point you once more at the interview with Alma Alexander.)
Third — because I might as well just make this a post of miscellanea — something I missed during LJ’s problems last Friday, putting me well behind the train when I finally saw it come through, but Catherynne Valente has posted the first chapter of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which is utterly delightful. There will be new chapters every Monday, and there is a story behind why she’s conducting the project this way.
Fourth — utter silliness — “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” literalized, in case there’s anybody left on the planet who hasn’t seen it already. Basically, what if the lyrics to a song actually described what was happening in the music video?
Fifth, a cute poem explaining the whole Schroedinger’s Cat thing.
I have one more thing open in my browser that needs linky, but it needs more serious linky than this, so I’ll save it for now. Ladies and gents, as I startled my husband by loudly declaring to what I thought was an empty house, I’m finally back! I feel like myself again.
